When their tremors had ceased, Sarah knew her life would never be the same.

Max lay beside her, resting his head on her chest, stroking her belly.

Sarah smiled down at him and ran her hand through his hair.

“Do you feel any different?” Max asked, his voice rumbling through her rib cage.

She thought about it.

“Yes,” she said. “It felt good, the way you’d expect, amazing. But also in another way, something I’ve never felt before. It was almost like… like something was coming out of me. Does that sound crazy?”

“Look at the flowers,” he said.

She wrenched her gaze from her mate to look.

The small round pot of mums was unrecognizable.

Bright yellow blossoms spilled out of the flower pot and onto the table and the bed, trailing to the floor like English ivy.

“Did- did I do that?” Sarah asked.

“I think you did,” Max said. “I certainly didn’t do it, I’m just a shifter.”

“Is that supposed to happen?”

“My rediscovered siblings at the farm told me that some kind of magic portal has opened in Tarker’s Hollow and things are changing,” Max said musingly. “People with latent magical powers are having them awoken.”

“Latent magical powers?”

“They told me Adrian’s mate’s power awakened just after his three hundredth moon,” he explained. “Everyone thinks the residual magic cast off when his spell was broken was the reason.”

“This was in me all along?” Sarah asked.

“Maybe,” Max said, nodding. “I’m not surprised your power nurtures plants. You always smelled like rain on a thirsty field.”

“I- I did?”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “You did. Are you okay with this?”

“Yes,” she said. “Are you kidding? You just gave me a super power and you want to know if I’m okay with it?”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Max said.

“That’s true,” Sarah said. “But it’s all good stuff. I mean I guess my lawn care bill might be going up…”

“I thought you lived in a co-op in the city,” Max said.

---

“That was a joke,” Sarah explained. “Although I’m not sure I want to live in the city anymore.”

He stretched out beside her on his side and smoothed a piece of her hair off her forehead.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” he said gently.

“Do what?”

“Pretend that you want to change your life,” he said. “I can easily sell the rest of the business and we’ll live in Glacier City. Company’s not worth a king’s ransom or anything, but it’ll be enough to cover us until I can find a job out west.”

“You would do that?” Sarah asked.

“Of course I’ll do that,” he said. “I don’t want you to change a thing about your life. Except that I don’t want you to have to work so hard that you never see our son.”

Sarah sat up.

“What are you trying to say?” she demanded.

“I’m saying that I love you and I want you to be able to spend time with Orson, and any other kids we might have. I’m okay with working more than one job if I need to do that to cover our bills,” he told her.

“First of all, I spend a lot of time with Orson, I don’t like you implying that I don’t,” she said. “And secondly, are you really so proud that you’d rather work yourself to an early grave than spend my money?”

“Your money is stuck in those trees back in Asheville,” he retorted. “Unless you’re planning on using your new gift to grow those trees a lot faster. And the reason you locked your inheritance up was for safe-keeping. That was a good plan, not something you should change.”

“Wait, what?” she asked, incredulous.

“I said that I don’t want you spending your inheritance on an easy lifestyle for me,” he said. “I can provide for us. Save that money for the kids one day. Please.”

Sarah stared at him for a moment, the pieces clicking together.

“What?” he demanded.

“Oh Max,” she said. “You really don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“I thought you would have googled me by now,” she said. “The money I invested in the timberland, it’s not an inheritance, it’s mine. I earned it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m a software developer. You knew that, right?”

“Yes. You work for a big company,” he said.

“But I didn’t used to,” she explained. “I wrote my first big software program when I was in high school. My parents are teachers. They spent a lot of time entering data on their students into different programs - one to take roll, one for school breakfasts and lunches, one for standardized testing, one for who has to leave early or arrive late for music or newspaper, and on and on. There are thousands of students at the school, and hundreds of thousands in the state. It hit me that if everything went into one system they might be able to use the data to predict things.”

“Like what?”

“Like whether providing a free breakfast made it more likely that a student’s test scores would improve,” she said. “Or even whether a particular student was likely to do poorly on a particular section of the exam, so that the teachers could spend time coaching the exact material that might help that particular student.”

“That’s pretty amazing,” Max said.

“I thought so,” Sarah said with a smile. “I implemented the program as my junior project, just at our school. And the predictive algorithms worked. The local paper did a story and then a national news outlet picked it up.”

“Wow, Sarah, that’s great,” Max said.

“Then we got a call from a headhunting firm,” she went on.

“They wanted to hire you,” Max said.

“No,” she said. “They wanted my software. They liked the idea of gathering diverse data on candidates and then predicting whether they would be a good match for a job, what mix of salary, benefits and flex-time might lure them in, that kind of thing.”

“That’s crazy,” Max said.

“What’s really crazy is how much money they paid me for the software,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t want that money to ruin my life. I wanted to go to college and work and have a real life. So I did some research. I love the outdoors, I always have. Putting the money into a forest was the perfect idea.”

“So you locked your own money away from yourself,” he said slowly. “So it wouldn’t spoil you.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Except that my reputation kind of precedes me. At least in my field it does. I guess I’ll never know if they used my own software to work it all out, but I got some pretty amazing job offers when I finished college. And the one I took has been paying me obscenely for years. And they give me flex time. Since Orson was born I’ve only gone to the office four days out of seven. And I’ve got enough savings built up again that I could retire today if I wanted to.”

“Do you want to?”

“Until this week I would have said no,” she told him thoughtfully. “I like my work.”

He nodded and smiled. He liked his work too, of course he would understand.

“But after finding out that Orson is a shifter I don’t know anymore,” she said. “I don’t think he can live in the city.”

“The spell worked for me,” Max said. “And when he’s an adult he can live wherever he wants.”

“I don’t want to put a spell on Orson,” Sarah said. “I like him the way he is.”

Max’s eyebrows went up. He opened his mouth, and closed it again.

“Sarah,” he said at last, “you know we can’t just have our kid turn into a bear in the middle of the grocery store.”

“You said you could build a cabin in our forest,” Sarah said. “Is that true?”

“Well, yes,” he replied.

“And your parents are shifters, right?”

“Yeah, they are,” he agreed.

“Then we’ll hole up for a couple of years, until Orson understands his power and how he needs to handle it in public,” she said. “He’ll have us, and your parents, and any Harkness kids that want to come out to visit and camp.”

“What about school?”

“By the time he’s old enough for school I think he’ll be able to control his shifting,” Sarah said. “And if he can’t, we’ll figure it out then.”

They sat quietly for a moment. He was taking it in. She hoped he would see it her way.

“This is a big change for you,” Max said finally.

“Not really, I already do a lot of work from home,” Sarah smiled. “Maybe I’ll develop my own software to help with the logging business.”

“I’ll bet you could,” he said. “Though I don’t think I can outbid the other companies just yet.”

“You could pay me in other ways,” she suggested, raising an eyebrow.

She didn’t anticipate that Max would pounce on her, but as soon as his lips touched hers she was a goner.

She just had time to notice that the flowers were crawling up the walls toward the ceiling before she was lost in his arms once again.